We let ourselves get lazy and comfortable and now they're rebooting The god-damned Maze Runner
Wes Ball, who directed all three Maze Runner movies—and next week's Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes—will produce on the revival project
See, this is what happens when you start fucking around with Hunger Games prequels, with all their Songbirds And Snakes and shit. You turn your back for 10 seconds, Hollywood gets some big, dumb, dystopian ideas, and suddenly, we’re staring down the barrel of a full-fledged Maze Runner reboot.
Do you understand what this means, reader? Do you understand how bad this could get, in terms of revivals of semi-remembered YA properties of the mid-2010s? Sure, it seems fun now. We’ll all have a laugh, thinking about I Am Number Four or, god help us, Divergent. But we might now only be three, four years from a scenario in which someone mentions a movie called The Scorch Trials, and you might have to ask which one they mean. “No, not that The Death Cure, the one from 2029.” It’s unconscionable.
But we, as we so frequently lament, do not control all of reality, and so it’s true: Universal is putting into development a reboot of The Maze Runner, reviving the film series based off the books by James Dashner, about… Actually, you know what? We have genuinely read the Wikipedia synopses for these things like five times over the last 10 years, and we honest to god couldn’t tell you what the they’re about. Teenagers in mazes? An evil organization literally called “WICKED”? A disease called The Flare that pushes you into a state called The Gone, before you ultimately turn into a Crank, which is a zombie that can also do drugs? We wish we were capable of making these things up, but we aren’t, because the part of our brains that used to handle creativity has now been colonized by Maze Runner factoids.
The original Maze Runner movies came out in 2014, 2015, and 2018, respectively, and were all directed by Wes Ball, who somehow pivoted from that to next week’s The Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes, and from that to the upcoming Zelda film. The movies starred Dylan O’Brien and Kaya Scodelario as two of the titular maze-runnin’ teens, and made genuinely good money off of budgets that Ball and his team kept respectably low, which is probably why we’re here talking about this right now.
As for the new film, Ball is still set to produce, while Jack Paglen, who wrote the screenplay for largely incoherent Johnny Depp techno-thriller Transcendence, will pen the script, presumably attempting to cram as many Grievers, Gladers, Immunes, Runners, Cranks, etc. into this sucker as he can. Will it be a sequel, or a reboot? Well, chew on this chunk of gristle from THR’s write-up of the news, and then you try to tell us what the fuck the answer to that question actually is: “The hope is to make a sort of continuation of the story yet also return to the elements that made the first movie connect with its audience.” What do you even call that? A sequelboot? Requel? The Force Awakens? Anyway, it’s happening: Brace yourselves for the onslaught of YA Adaptations, Pt. 2.